I have around 300 albums in FLAC format. They are all tagged correctly with album art and stored in a folder structure Artist/Album on my server.

Sadly DAP players didn't evolve the way I wanted them to, my old Cowon X5L is still the best that I can find! I had expected by now to see TB players etc. So I've given in and I've switched to an Android phone with two memory cards a 16GB and 32GB in it, probably around 40GB of that I'll use for music.

Ogg Vorbis for several reasons is the best thing for me to use, it'd be a lot easier to use FLAC but it's just too large a file size.

I use Foobar2000 to play music, and I'm aware of a way I can use to mass convert to Ogg Vorbis into a new folder structure which works very well. There are two tasks that it doesn't do. It doesn't copy over an image for album art, and it doesn't embed album art into the .ogg file. Either option would work for me, I would prefer the image as the player I use on my phone will use a single image for a folder, but if the only way to do it is embedding the images into the files then so be it.

I'm quite happy with the whole process of converting to Ogg Vorbis, I used to use it and I prefer it over MP3, I'm quite happy with the quality settings and file size trader off etc, the only issue I have is batch converting everything.

Has anyone conquered this problem before and could offer me an easy solution?

I don't use a vorbis player with color screen and album art tag support, i have to remove the album art embedded in flac because mi dap (iriver t60) doesnt play ogg vorbis file with the art, skip them.

You can convert FLACs to OGG vorbis with Media monkey (use dlls) and the album art will be embedded in the ogg vorbis file if you want, and also copy the album art to the folder album.

MusicBee (use OGGENC.EXE) also do the job, and also resize de picture art to a specified size for safe some space.

The programs works better in the Dap sync mode on the fly than the simply converter tool (more options).

Thanks for the suggestions Alex!I've looked at Media Monkey for a few minutes and I don't like it at all. It looks as if it's utterly useless unless I let it take control of everything. Add to that it's got a weird interface and since there's a gold version I assume the free version is going to nag! For what I want it to do it's far more complicated. Additionally it's tag based not folder based, which is a big failing too (in my opinion!). I strongly suspect it'd be far quicker to mass convert in foobar and then just copy the album art across 1 file at a time, 300 times than learn to use Media Monkey.

MusicBee on the other hand seems a lot simpler, and a lot like the type of program I like using. I've just tried it on a single album, and it generated what I was looking for, with an album art jpg. :) I've found the command line options for Ogg Vorbis creation, so I'll be able to tweak that to where I want it to be as well.

You did suggest I use OGGENC.EXE. Is there a reason for this? It seemed to work fine with OggEnc2.exe that came with the program... I notice it is not multithreaded, so sadly it'll take 6 times as long to convert everything. That isn't a big problem though, since it won't be done often. Finally in Music Bee it only gives me the option to sync to my phone as MP3 or WMA, not as ogg. I suspect this might be the phone or Windows thinking the phone cannot support ogg (when I try to copy across ogg files it says this), although I'm certain the phone can support ogg.

I use Foobar2000 to play music, and I'm aware of a way I can use to mass convert to Ogg Vorbis into a new folder structure which works very well. There are two tasks that it doesn't do. It doesn't copy over an image for album art, and it doesn't embed album art into the .ogg file. Either option would work for me, I would prefer the image as the player I use on my phone will use a single image for a folder, but if the only way to do it is embedding the images into the files then so be it.

it would seem you're not running the latest version of foobar2000. notice under the "Other" section you can configure it to copy any files that are in the source directory.

FlacSquisher works very well in the case of only wanting to encode new files though; that was my primary motivation behind writing it. Rip a new CD, hit "Encode", and FlacSquisher will only encode the new files. If there's an easy way to get Foobar to do that, then I would have just used that, instead of spending all that time writing a new program!

Well, I had a dozen or so CDs which I integrated to my collection this evening. I thought I'd give flacsquisher a spin and see how well it handled things.

Pretty flawless I have to say! The only comment I have at this point is that it copied all the jpgs across, rather than just folder.jpg which is what I'd prefer. I keep booklet etc scans with the flacs, but I only want folder.jpg with the .ogg files. If you were going to add something then perhaps a function in addition to copying specific extensions, but also a function to copy specific filenames too.

Something cosmetic is that it seemed to try to get occenc to encode all the other files, not just the FLACs. This just caused a bit of spam in the console window, but no real harm at all.

If you play around with the "ignore extensions" and "copy extensions" settings, you should be able to get it so that no files are being sent to the encoder unless you want them to.

Also, I'll confess that the "extensions" lists don't actually look at file extensions, they just check if the filename ends with that string. Because of this, you can add "folder.jpg" into the list of "extensions" to be copied, and it will happen.

Unfortunately, FlacSquisher currently processes the "ignore" list before the "copy" list. I'll change it with the next release, so that you'll be able to ignore .jpgs, and copy folder.jpg, and it will work exactly how you want it to.